


swear an allegiance to things you can't hide

by DrowningInStarlight



Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Ancient Rome, Gen, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Roleswap AU!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:00:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21622597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrowningInStarlight/pseuds/DrowningInStarlight
Summary: What if Sasha and Grizzop had made it home?And what if they found out home was more about the people who are with them?(Or, rather more to the point, the people whoaren't.)
Relationships: Grizzop drik Acht Amsterdam & Sasha Racket, Sasha Racket & Zolf Smith
Comments: 20
Kudos: 54





	swear an allegiance to things you can't hide

**Author's Note:**

> major spoilers for the Rome arc. 
> 
> title from the last steampunk waltz by ghostfire.

Hamid and Azu are dead. It’s hard to believe, even now, but Sasha knows it’s true. Rome took them, like it took everything else. 

They’d been camping out six weeks now. Keeping vigil. Einstein had popped by sometimes, but he was always subdued, quiet. Sasha never had anything to say. She just sat shoulder to shoulder with Grizzop in the den they’d built in the ruins, watching without a word. Waiting. 

But now they were giving up. It’s been six weeks, and Grizzop hates staying still— it’s a sign of the depth of his grief, the fact he’s stayed here for so long. Maybe it’s a kind of penance, Sasha doesn’t know. She doesn’t know anything at all in this new world, except that Hamid and Azu are never coming home. 

Grizzop stamps out the final embers of the fire they’ve been burning ever since they escaped from the rift. Sasha adjusts the pack on her shoulder, pulls her bandanna up over her face, a futile attempt to keep out the grit. They’re survivors, and surviving means adjusting fast. She’s never hated anywhere as much as she hates Rome, but she’s good at it now, they both are. Finding food, making shelter, knowing which sounds are the corrupted background magic of the city and which they need to go investigate, back to back, weapons drawn. Sasha had thought she’d had her hope beaten out of her in Other London, but it still leaps painfully in her heart every time a whisper on the wind sounds like her name. 

“Ready?” Grizzop says, in a low voice. All of their sounds are muted, nowadays. 

She nods. 

They don’t look back. 

—— 

Going renegade is a decision they don’t even have to talk about. 

(Grizzop’s prayers to Artemis turn bitter, a maelstrom of curses he barely manages to choke out. Sasha watches over him as he prays, and bites her lip til it bleeds.) 

This is a different world than the one Sasha left, but it is just as harsh. They grow harsher with it. 

(Sasha steals another knife, and cuts her hair even closer to her scalp. It doesn’t feel like release.) 

She knows people talk about them. She doesn’t care. Rome took Hamid and Azu. The kind ones, the gentle ones, they’re gone. All that’s left is her and Grizzop, angry and desperate, bleeding from wounds they don’t know how to heal. So they fight like wild animals caught in a trap, and people whisper in alleyways about the wraiths of Rome, the last remnants of that great horror. Perhaps, Sasha thinks, that is all she deserves. 

—— 

After a while, they drift into Cairo. They’d avoided civilisation almost entirely so far, both of their own accord and because of dark warnings from other travellers on the road, but this seems… right. 

The sandstorms haven’t stopped, and the streets are empty, sand whispering across stone. Grizzop glances at Sasha as they walk down the silent highstreet. Something isn’t right. You get used to it. 

They find an abandoned building and set up camp, and Sasha hates how familiar that particular routine is to her. Grizzop kicks the sand piled up by the door. 

They don’t talk. The talkers are dead, aren't they?

  
  


It actually gets dark, here. In Rome, the sky was always drenched in dull, red light, the air filled with a humming that you could feel in your teeth. Cairo is empty, but it’s hard to tell if that’s a relief. 

Sasha is on watch. They don’t need a fire really, not here, but Grizzop had built one anyway, going through the motions on autopilot the way he had every single night since returning. It’s burning low now, and she lets it. Grizzop is asleep in the corner, curled up, his bow within arm’s reach. He doesn’t look peaceful, but he never does anymore. His armour is dull and scratched, a cloak pulled around his shoulders to hide what little shine remains. Sasha’s jacket is torn and patched, torn and patched, and she carries weapons openly now, both a warning and a threat.  _ Back off _ and  _ try me.  _

The heat is stifling, and sand clicks between her teeth. It’s easy to imagine that Azu’s going to walk through the door, big and pink and smiling kind, just like she did the first time Sasha ever met her. It’s hard to remember that Hamid isn’t curled up in a bundle opposite Grizzop, snoring softly, dark lashes light upon his cheeks. 

It’s impossible to forget the sickening lurch of planeswalking, the feeling of Hamid’s fingers slipping out of hers. The way Grizzop had cried and raged at the rift, the twisted portal that had torn their friends from them. 

She can’t breathe. 

In Rome, they stayed low, hidden in cellars and sunken streets, and it’s some small mercy that she doesn’t have to do that anymore. Heading for the roof is as much instinct as thought, leaving Grizzop still sleeping by the fire.  _ Sleeping like the dead, _ she thinks, then winces. The dead don’t sleep. They’re just dead. 

There’s no gargoyles up on this roof, of course, but it’s cooler and the sky is huge and dark and clear. She breathes a little easier. Swinging her legs over the roof’s edge, she glances downwards, a quick perimeter check. Nothing. Just the rustle of the wind. 

It’s peaceful. Does she deserve peace? 

  
  


She doesn’t sleep, she’s on watch and that’s not something you take lightly in this brave new world. But she does relax, as the sky starts to lighten, staring out across the empty street. The frantic footsteps behind her startle her. She just has time to pull back from the roof’s edge when Grizzop collides with her. 

_ “Sasha,”  _ he says, angrily and like he’s trying not to cry all in one.  _ “Don’t do that to me.”  _

“What?” Sasha asks, letting her hand drop away from her knife. “What’s going on?” 

_ “Artemis, _ I—” he hugs her fiercely, then just barely pulls away. “You’ve got to tell me when you need to run off or whatever, I thought—” 

Sasha reaches forward and clumsily pushes their foreheads together. “Nothing’ll get me,” she promises, as if it’s a thing she gets to decide. “Or you, either. It  _ won’t.”  _

Grizzop just exhales tiredly, closing his eyes and resting his forehead against hers. “Warn me, next time?” 

She nods. 

  
  


(As far away as it is possible to be, Azu lies dead in Rome’s dust. The paladin’s sacrifice was determined by forces higher than she, but she hadn’t hesitated. Hamid had screamed and screamed until dragonfire almost brought the room down around his shoulders, then he’d run as the earth was rent to free a dragon far mightier than he. There is no time for tears. Ignore the screams.) 

  
  


They stay up on the roof until the sun rises. Sasha thinks she must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knows is Grizzop shaking her. 

“Sasha,” he says, and his tone is enough to drive her heartbeat up. “There’s people down there, and— something’s wrong.” 

She looks over the lip of the roof, keeping low. The street is bustling, it’s a market, by the looks of it. People trading goods, children tugging on the hands of parents, pets pulling on leads. But Grizzop’s right. There’s something wrong. 

The entire street is deadly, deadly silent. 

“This is why people warned us off the cities,” she says under her breath. “We need to go,  _ now.”  _

Her knives are already flashes of silver in her palms, and Grizzop’s bow is by his side. He nods sharply. 

They descend the stairs almost silently, the wood creaking infinitesimally under their boots. The floor they’d made camp on is empty, and there’s still no sound from the crowd that they know is filling the streets outside. 

_ Open the door? _ Sasha gestures at him, and Grizzop inches towards it.

The market is still alive with movement, still soundless. Sasha slips outside, standing close to the wall, but no one even looks at her. She moves further into the crowd, carefully not to touch anyone. She can feel Grizzop following warily behind her, but still there’s no reaction from the dead eyed people. 

Someone walks into her, and she swallows her shocked exclamation. The man doesn’t stop, doesn’t even seem to see her. There are lines of blue, pulsing with a steady rhythm, tracing across his face, down his neck. She swallows again. 

Grizzop touches her wrist questioningly. She glances at him quickly, unwilling to take her eyes of the suddenly menacing crowd. Her unease is reflected in his eyes, and he nods back towards the building they’d just come from. 

“We can’t get trapped—” she begins. Her voice is barely above a whisper, but every single head in the crowd jerks to stare at her. 

“We should go,” Grizzop says, voice rising in pitch, “We should go  _ now—”  _

The man who walked into Sasha turns sharply and takes a swing at her with his fist. Her knife comes up to meet it, instinctive as breathing. His blood runs blue. 

She’d be lying if she said it didn’t feel good to finally hurt something. To take back control, any kind of control, to make these blank eyed people stare at her with the closest thing they show to fear. It feels  _ good. _

(Sasha died in Rome. She’s surviving on the Rackett bloodthirst. Part of her is horrified, the rest of her is too far gone to care.) 

“We can’t get out—” she says, and at every syllable more heads whip round to stare at her. 

“But we can take them down with us?” Grizzop finishes, and Sasha nods. Grizzop’s already smiling. They’ve lived for nothing since that twisted rift, but maybe they won’t die for nothing. 

Sasha’s knives glint in the Cairo sunshine. 

___ 

  
  


News travels slowly at the best of times, nowadays, but it travels slower still to the island where Wilde’s base is. And when the slow news arrives, even less of it can be actually trusted, and even when it can be trusted, Zolf generally isn’t there enough to hear it. So when he returns to the island, tired and troubled from his latest recon mission, Wilde hands him a sheaf of papers without a word. 

“What’s going on?” Zolf askes, even as he shuffles through the papers. They’re reports, mostly, tales of… the wraiths of Rome. News may travel slow, but Zolf’s missions involve going straight to the sources of news, and he’s heard the name. 

“Read it,” Wilde says, “And tell me you don’t recognise the style.” 

Zolf reads it, and Zolf recognises the style. 

“Fuck,” he says. “I didn’t know Cairo was that bad, or that anyone could…” 

“Kill almost a hundred of the infected and live to tell the tale?” 

“Yeah. But—” 

“Are they infected?” Wilde finishes for him. “We don’t know. We can’t know, unless someone…” 

“I’ll do it, Wilde, no need to be ominous about it. Sasha’s my—  _ was  _ my friend.”

“She was my friend too,” Wilde tells him quietly. “And Grizzop, in his way. Zolf, don’t go into this with high hopes. Not for them, nor for the others.” 

It hasn’t escaped their notice that there is no mention of Hamid or Azu in the reports. 

“You know I won’t,” Zolf says, already turning to leave. He pauses by the door, just for a moment. “Wilde. I’m your friend too.” 

  
  


—— 

  
  


Sasha recognises the man standing in the shadows. For a moment, she thinks she’s hallucinating— it’s been five days since Cairo, and they haven’t stopped moving. Grizzop had healed himself and Sasha until he had nothing left to give, refusing to beg Artemis for help. They’ve barely been sleeping, and sometimes darkness creeps in, dancing on the edges of Sasha’s vision. 

Zolf Smith isn’t an hallucination. His hair is whiter, his eyes are more hollowed, the glaive in his hand is unfamiliar. Sasha sighs. There’s no way this ends well. 

(But they’ve been hurtling towards their tragic end since Rome, haven’t they? Maybe better at the hands of someone she’d once called a friend.) 

(Once called family.)

She knows he’s seen her, but she doesn’t acknowledge him. Grizzop’s inside, setting up their camp. All she has to do is call and he’ll be there, but she doesn’t do that, either. She just stands and lets Zolf approach, not lifting her eyes from the ground. 

“Sasha,” he says. 

“Zolf.” 

“It’s, uh, well. It’s been a while.” 

He sounds awkward, but out of the corner of her eye she sees the grip on his glaive stay strong and steady. 

“Yeah.” 

“Hamid?” he asks. Their conversations were always like this, brief, confident in the knowledge that they understood each other well enough to communicate the way they both preferred. She’s missed it, but she isn’t sure she understands anything anymore. 

“He’s dead. Died in Rome.” She doesn’t expect it to be a surprise to him, and sure enough Zolf doesn’t start. He closes his eyes, though, just for a second, and she turns to face him. “Are you going to kill me, boss?” she asks tiredly. 

“I— no,” he says, and she sees him looking almost stricken, even though they both know that’s what he was sent here to do. “Sasha, come home with me. Me and Wilde, we’re working together, we’re trying to solve this. We’ve got safe places for you to stay while you see if you’re infected, you could rest—” 

“Can’t,” she says. She knows that he knows she can’t. She lifts her gaze and looks him in the eye for the first time since Prague. “I’ve got friends I can’t let down.” 

(Living and dead. Mostly dead.) 

“Right,” Zolf says softly. “Okay.” 

“Thanks, boss.” 

“I—” 

“Tell Wilde bye from me, yeah? And from Grizzop.” 

“Yeah. Yeah, I will.” 

“Bye, Zolf.” 

“Bye, Sasha.” 

The shadows are suddenly empty. She wonders if he learnt that trick from her. 

There isn’t a happy ending. Sasha goes back inside. 

**Author's Note:**

> find me to chat (or write strongly worded letters) at drowninginstarlights on tumblr!


End file.
